Posts Tagged ‘prosiebensat’

This week we discovered there was an issue with the navigation mesh (the game object allowing the Norns to navigate through the level) in the seashore environment. This issue was more important than we thought, and it took us most of the week to fix it.

We still managed to make some progress, like reviewing the quests to fix some wrong icons / typos in the texts. And we also have implemented some new toys made by the artists. Just have a look on the screenshot below^^.

Here’s Jimi playing guitar. Or air guitar. For some reason the Norns don’t take the guitar, we are currently working on it…

This last week we made the Norns more reactive to what happens around them: they will do a “surprised” animation when an object appears next to them (after buying one in the shop, for example) and most of the time will look sad when another Norn dies near them.

Also, we continued to work on the Android version. For example, we fixed a bug with Norns sometimes appearing with a totally black texture.

Not a lot of things to say about last week! Two programmers were in holidays, so we mainly tested the last modifications (science kit, Norn collection screen) and fixed some related glitches.

So, here is simply a screenshot of the science kit:

- Chemicals are classed by categories (here you have the Immunitary category)- The graphic only displays the selected chemical (here, antibody 0), but when no chemicals are selected , it shows all the chemicals of the current category- As you can see, there are injection prices. It should not prevent you to experiment with it as prices are generally cheap, with some exceptions: food-related chemicals (injecting directly proteins, or increasing the glycogen reserve…) and the life chemical.- An icon on the top-right allows you to switch between displaying the graphic or the chemical description.

This week we worked on the science kit. It includes :- adding a short description for each chemical- improving the graphic readability by adding the ability to display only one chemical at once- An icon “!” now shows near some important chemicals when they are critically low / high

We also worked on the appearance of the Norn collection screen. Now it is only one page with a slider (instead of the more rigid “multiple fixed pages” we had before), and Norns are organized by “series”. It doesn’t really change a lot of things functionally-wise, but we feel it to be more convenient and better-looking.

This week we implemented some “resources” in the environments. As explained in the last update, components needed for crafting can be dropped when your Norns interact with various agents. But sometimes we needed to add some resources : for example, nothing can logically drop wheat in the current state of the game. So we added some wheat plants, this way you will be able to create cookies^^.

We are currently working on a genome issue which may happen when crossing two genomes. It means eggs laid by pregnant Norns may have this problem, and in that case they can’t be hatched. We are working on it.

Sorry for the late weekly update ! It will be a bit different today. Between the technical tasks, fixes and things which cannot be showed because still in progress, I can’t really do the usual update. So let’s say a bit more about the Crafting machine instead.

Right above, you can see a simple screenshot of the crafting interface. It allows you to obtain some objects by combining various components. It mainly means that you have another way to obtain objects / agents (rather than buying them with the coins generated with time).

The components are obtained when Norns do actions (watering / cleansing a plant, using a toy, tickling a critter…), so it may be interesting to “push” new players to experiment the various actions Norns can do.

If you don’t have the required resources, you can buy them with some Golden Eggs, but all resources can be found in normal gameplay.

The categories on the left are still subject to change, but you will be able to craft genes to be used with the Splicing machine or potions / food for the item kit.

This week we worked on a tool to ensure the Norn genomes will be modified like it should in case of a genome update. It means that if a game update changes the way the Norn behave, we should be able to “update” the already present Norns too. It was a bit tricky, and we still have some work to do on it.

We also worked on an improvement of the loading screen. If for some reason the game data has to be redone, it now displays the progression at the loading (before this modification, the loading bar stayed at 0% for some seconds in that case).

Also, we fixed a bug where the game looked for a pregnant male Norn model and crashed^^”.

Whenever selling objects, we now send a message to the server. In case of a server’s latency, selling an object will now be better handled.We also implemented a “stage” server, which will allow us to keep versions of a game waiting some approval before pushing the modifications for real.Also, we are working on the science kit, in which the informations are currently too clustered.

We also finished the genome patch tool I’ve mentioned last week. It covers our main progress for these last days.

As you have seen, the beta is coming soon. The game has been validated by Apple, it is really a good new for us.

As for this week, we did some minor fixes (removing a “fake” tab in an interface which has no use, changing some background colors, updating some localization…).

Ensuring the game will be available on Android is a long task, as we need to port the game on a more recent version of our engine to ensure some performance improvement. But it starts to bear fruits, as the game finally runs on Android ! There is still a lot of work on this side though (a lot of glitches to fix). I wish you a nice week-end !^^